The smoke detector in the flat next door has been chirping once a minute for the past few days. Took a few days for me to work out where the noise was coming from as it is so clear I thought it must be coming from somewhere in my flat. However, pressed my ear against the wall and it is definitely coming from the corridor of the neighbouring flat.
Knocked yesterday at about 6 p.m. and politely explained the situation. Neighbour said OK, she'd look at it. I kind of expected at some point over the course of the evening they would deal with it and the noise would stop. But chirping continued all evening and through the night. (I can hear it in my bedroom as well as living room.)
Knocked again this morning and asked politely if she could deal with it. She said she couldn't reach it, so what can she do, beside it wasn't bothering her and that the noise was faint so I couldn't possibly hear it in my flat. If I couldn't hear it, I wouldn't have been round there in the first place!
They are in their 30s, look fit. I've offered to lend them a ladder and buy a new battery, but she refused (fair enough, social distancing at the moment etc.). She said she'd get her flatmate to look at it, but it's been hours ago and nothing has happened. He is in there, I've seen him go out for a cigarette.
The noise, for me, is intensely irritating. I could handle the situation better if one of them had come round and just said, look, we can't reach it, so we can't do anything about it. But along with the irritating noise now is their attitude.
So, I accept I can't make them do it. I am not going to go round knocking on their door every day, as I have already asked politely twice. It will take me some time to track down their landlord as I don't currently know their name, but there are some avenues I can explore to get their contact details.
What I want to know is - does anyone have any idea how long the thing will chirp for before the battery actually dies? Just so I can know if an end is in sight any time soon?
(Of course a related worry is if they claim they can't reach it to change the battery, does that mean when it dies, they won't put a new battery in and therefore won't have a functioning smoke detector?)